13 Growth Hacking Techniques You Can Apply Right Now

Growth hacking is the idea that an entrepreneur can take a clever non-traditional approach to increase the growth rate and adoption of his or her product by ‘hacking’ something together specifically for growth purposes.

Most startups find themselves facing the same problem: they build a product that no one ends up using.

Say you have a startup idea. You assemble a team and in six months, you have a product you are actually confident to release. When that day finally comes, you launch and nothing happens. If you are lucky, you get an article on Techcrunch, a top spot in Product Hunt and several thousand users, but most of them stop using it after a few days.

I bet you were hoping for a huge, viral growth curve. Instead, you face with the harsh reality: you only have handful of users registered, and they are churning incredibly fast.

At Piktochart we went through the same problem, that’s why in this post we’ll analyze 11 different growth hacking tactics that actually work:

Before You Start Growing: Define Your User Personas

Defining your user personas is something every business should do as early as possible. Customer development, understanding your target audience and being able to segment them correctly and talk to them differently is the secret sauce to startup success. This is the driving force behind major strategic, product and growth decisions.

Let’s take a look at Groove. They had a great product and customers were happy, but their landing page barely worked – the conversion rate was 2.3%. They knew something needed to change, so they decided to test a new landing page and re-think their design strategy. They started by talking to power customers on the phone and via Skype, and ask them about what they loved and hated about Groove. This led into a copy-first approach to the landing page, centered around users needs and objections. After testing it, conversion rate doubled to 4.7%, where they are today.

Another great example is KISSmetrics. After years of talking to customers and learning from them, they discovered that their target audience is segmented into two user personas: SaaS startup founders, and eCommerce managers. Their understanding of user personas can be appreciated in their live demo (image below). As soon as you visit the page, it prompts you to select two main configuration: SaaS and eCommerce.

A great way of doing customer development is to use Qualaroo, the company co-founded by Sean Ellis. It offers a simple way of embedding customer surveys and contact forms to uncover customer insights you might not be aware of.

Somethings to look for: why people hesitate to sign up, what information is missing on your site or what are visitors’ objections to making a purchase.

Send paid traffic to targeted landing pages instead of the homepage

Pay-per-click ads is one of the most effective acquisition tools in terms of ROI and speed. The problem is you must know how to use them. One of the most common mistakes is sending paid traffic to your homepage. This is a huge no-no. There is a principle in copywriting called ‘consistency’ and essentially, it means that visitors need to move swiftly through your funnel or they will get out. By having a landing page that addresses or matches the copy in your ad, visitors will feel compelled to buy or know more.

Double-sided Referrals

After launching, Dropbox faced a huge issue: their initial pay-per-click test had a whopping $233-388 cost per acquisition for every new customer, but their LTV (life time value) was $99. That’s when they implemented their referral program: invite a friend and both get extra free space. The results: 100k registered users grew to 4M registered users in just 15 months. That’s a 3900% growth increase.

Airbnb also recreated that technique successfully: whenever a friend uses your $25 coupon, you’ll get $25 off when they travel or $75 when they host someone in their apartment.

Hacking the Supply Side

When building a marketplace, one of the biggest challenges you’ll face is getting the right equilibrium between the supply side and the demand side until you hit mass adoption. Let’s picture Lyft, the ride-sharing app that competes with Uber. Having too many users on the demand side will negatively affect wait-time and pricing for passengers; and having too many users on the supply side will upset drivers as they will have no customers. If they aren’t making money, they’ll start leaving the platform.

The most elegant solution for this problem is to fake the supply side. What Lyft did in the beginning is pay drivers an hourly rate to just sit in their cars and wait for passengers. The result: passengers were thrilled to find out that every time they opened the app, there was a free driver around.

Abandoned Cart Emails for eCommerce

Sometimes, customers are willing and ready to make a purchase, but something gets on the way. If they forgot their credit card upstairs, or the baby is crying, you just lost a customer that was 99% sold. Now it’s time to get them back using email messages.

Cart abandonment emails are extremely effective as a sales recovery technique. According to Salescycle, half of these emails are opened and one third lead back to a purchase.

Posting on Product Hunt

What started as a side-project for Ryan Hoover, become one of the top startups in 2014. Product Hunt surfaces new, interesting products every day. Getting featured on the daily list of products will have a major effect on your initial users base. Yes, I’m talking several thousand users.

But that’s not it. If your product is fascinating and you are lucky enough, the press and major influencers will pick it up and share with their respective audiences, amplifying the effect at least 10x.

People have written about this extensively here, here and here.

NomadList’s analytics 2 weeks after hitting #1 in Product Hunt.

Discover your ‘core product value’ and build it into your onboarding process

Every product is different, and has a unique core product value to users. Discovering what this is and helping your users reach to that point will skyrocket your engagement levels and lower your churn rate.

For instance, Twitter realized that their real value is experienced once users follow at least 30 accounts. That’s their ‘aha moment’. In response to that observation, they completely re-designed their onboarding process to encourage new users to follow as many active accounts as possible.

Facebook applied the same tactic. They discovered that users get the most value when they have at least 14 friends. That’s their own, unique ‘aha’ moment. As soon as they discovered that metric, the growth team’s entire approach shifted: from that point forward, their job was to get as many new users to 14 friends in less than 10 days.

Share your users activity on Twitter/Facebook

Whenever a user interacts with your application in a way that can make them feel proud of what they did, you should prompt them to share the achievement to their friend on Twitter and Facebook. Instagram did this in the beginning by allowing users to post to Facebook via their API, but in my opinion, the best example is Quora: every time you answer a question, you can choose to post it on a social network with a single click.

As a daily Quora user, I love taking advantage of this feature. What’s even more impressive is that those tweets get twice the engagement (favorites and retweets) than whatever I post during the day.

Minimal Landing Pages

There is an endless debate about the comparison between long-form and minimal landing pages. As a growth hacker myself, I’m all in for minimal landing pages. First, they are great for single-action events, like capturing email addresses. This piece of information gives you endless possibilities – for instance, you can get them on an email drip campaign.

What’s even more important, they are extremely useful for rapid iteration. Building a minimal landing page like the one below takes significantly less time than a long form page, so your A/B testing and iteration rate will increase.

Integration with Other Services

Integrating your app with other external services can be a powerful growth driver. It allows you, as a small startup, to leverage on someone else’s already established user base.

One of the most recognized examples is BranchOut. Although the story doesn’t end well, Branchout managed to signup 33 million users and raise $49M using Facebook as a virality platform for their social professional networking service.

One word of caution: putting your eggs in a single basket might be dangerous. As soon as your startup takes off, you should start looking for alternative sources of growth. When Facebook changed its virality algorithm, Branchout growth stopped, leading the app to crash and burn.

Use Facebook Lookalike Audiences To Acquire New Customers

Since March 2013, Facebook started offering one of the most powerful yet underutilized targeting options: Lookalike Audiences. In short, it allows you target ads to users who are similar to their actual customers away from Facebook. Advertisers can ask Facebook to find the top 1% or 5% of users in a specific country who are similar to your existing customers. This is a great way of reaching new potential clients that couldn’t be found in any other way.

Some of the powerful targeting options are:

• upload your subscriber list and target ads to people similar to them.
• target ads similar to your existing customer by uploading your customer list or finding users similar to the ones who converted.
• find users similar to any visitor to your site, or specific pages.

Build A Community Around Your Product

If you could create a site that for you users and potential customers to visit everyday, would you do it? The best way of doing this creating an online community where your users can discuss, engage, and showcase their work around your product and your industry.

Let’s take a quick look at Unbounce. Their web app allows you to create and easily A/B test landing pages without writing a single line of code. The product is clearly targeted to founders, marketers and anyone related to grow. That’s why they created the Unbounce Community, an online forum where marketing-related people can connect, learn and engage with each other.

Restrict Signups To Business Email Addresses

Restricting the amount of people who can signup to your product seems counterintuitive, but let explain using an example. Slack, the new hot team communication startups, only allows you to register with your work email address (yourname@piktochart.com, instead of yourname@gmail.com).  This serves two major purposes: first, it makes it ridiculously easy for you to invite your co-workers effortlessly, which drives growth. Second, it allows their sales team to automatically filter incoming leads, and only deal with real businesses.

“Free for Bloggers” Hack

Founders love it when someone writes a story or blogpost about their startup, but almost none makes it easier for bloggers to write about their product. Well, Hittail does. On their pricing page, they make it really clear that their tool is free for bloggers to review. Once they enter their email,  Hittail qualifies the blogger and sends them straight to a well-crafted ‘press’ page with all the necessary information, graphics and metrics to write a high-quality story.

Before You Leave, Something To Remember

On this post we’ve given you 13 different growth hacking tactics you can apply right now. You can copy them exactly, or you can use them as inspiration to come up with your own, unique hacks. Both options are valid.

However, there’s one thing you need to remember: growth is a mindset.  You need to think every growth experiment in terms of:

1. Make a hypothesis. This is when you actually come up with the idea. 
2. Build it. Once the idea is right, you need to implement it. You can code it yourself, get your team to do it our outsource it to a good freelancer.
3. Execute/drive traffic. If you are thinking about growth, you probably have some traffic now. If not, the best way of testing new hacks is pay-per-click ads because they are immediate.
4. Test it. Use Google Analytics, KISSmetrics or Mixpanel to decide if it works or not.
5. Kill it or maximize conversions. If it doesn’t work, start over with a new idea. If it works, then keep optimizing conversions for maximum results.

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How To Increase Conversions by 785% in One Day (Without A/B Testing)

If you want to grow your email list (FAST) there’s one thing you need to know:

Traditional bribes like free reports and email courses don’t have nearly the same juice that they used to.

So…

What CAN you offer that gets people to fork over their email address?

The Content Upgrade.

It’s a simple strategy that instantly increased my conversion rate from .54%. to 4.82%.

And in today’s case study I’m going to show you the exact step-by-step process that I used.

No One Wants Your Free Report (And What They Want Instead)

A few weeks ago I told you about The Social Squeeze Page, a simple page you can add to your site that converts like a champ:

While there’s nothing wrong with a page that converts at 21.7%…

…a single page — even one that converts at 21.7% — isn’t enough to build a thriving email list.

After all, as you can see from my Crazy Egg data, only 2% of my visitors click on the sidebar banner that takes them to the Social Squeeze Page:

Which got me thinking:

“How can I convert the 98% of people that DON’T go to my Social Squeeze Page?”

That’s when I noticed this weird thing Kim Roach was doing on her blog.

Instead of offering readers something vague — like free updates — she gave away a resource that was unique to each blog post.

Let me show you what I mean…

A few months ago, Kim’s published a post of the top 10 Fiverr gigs for small business owners.

“But wait, there’s more.”

When you scroll down to the bottom of the post you’ll notice that she has a link where you can download the top 20 Fiverr gigs:

If you click on that link, a box appears that asks you to opt-in to her email list:

A few days after reading Kim’s post, I noticed Bryan Harris doing the exact same thing on his blog.

For example, Bryan recently published a post that teaches people a productivity technique called “The Zero Based Calendar“.

At the end of that post Bryan offers access to a “bonus lesson” on productivity.

Like Kim’s post, you need to subscribe to get your hands on Bryan’s free resource.

That’s when I said to myself:

“Brian, building your email list is a top priority. You NEED to try this at Backlinko.”

(Yes, I talk to myself. Doesn’t everybody?  )

What happened next made my jaw practically hit the floor…

One Day. Two Links. 785% Increase in Conversions.

I decided to see if giving away a post-specific resource would increase conversions on my blog post: Google’s 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List.

(I’ll show you why I chose that post a bit later)

Before implementing the Content Upgrade, that page was converting at .54%.

Not horrible for a blog post…but not great either.

On June 1st I created a checklist and added LeadPages links to the top…

…and bottom of that post.

The result? A 785% increase in conversions (compared to the previous month).

Keep in mind that this isn’t a flukey conversion increase like you might see with an A/B test that only lasts a few days.

I’ve had over 4700 unique visitors and 370 conversions on that page since implementing the Content Upgrade. The sample size is more than enough to conclude that this data has legs to stand on.

Plus, as I’ll show you at the very end of this post, I’ve tested The Content Upgrade on three other posts…

…and it’s significantly boosted conversions on those posts too.

Here’s The Craziest Part…

If you count all of the opt-in forms that I have on the Backlinko blog, like in my sidebar:

On my homepage:

And at the bottom of every blog post:

I have a grand total of 54 opt-in forms on my blog.

The two little LeadPages links that I added to my Google Ranking Factors post now account for 30% of all new subscribers.

Think about that for a second.

Those two links bring in more subscribers than SIXTEEN opt-in forms.

Crazy, right?

How to Get More Subscribers Using The Content Upgrade

At this point you’re probably wondering:

“OK, I’m ready to try the The Content Upgrade. How do I start?”

Here’s a breakdown of the 5-step process:

Step 1: Find a high-traffic page on your site

Step 2: Identify a resource that would make the content better

Step 3: Create that resource

Step 4: Add the resource to your site

Step 5: Get more email subscribers

Now let’s dive into how you can add this list building machine to your site.

Step #1: Find a Page on Your Site That Gets a Lot of Traffic

This may sound simple, but stay with me.

If you want to maximize the number of subscribers that you get from The Content Upgrade, you need to start with a page that has the most potential for generating email subscribers.

In other words, blog posts on your site that bring in the most traffic.

Make sense?

You can easily find your most popular pages by going to Behavior –> Site Content –> Landing Pages in Google Analytics:

As you can see from that screenshot, my Google Ranking Factors blog post was the most popular page on my site.

So I started with that.

Once you’ve identified your site’s most popular page, it’s time for step #2…

Step #2: Identify a Resource That Will Make Your Content Even Better

This may not be easy to hear, but here it goes:

No one wants your free report.

Well, maybe that’s not 100% true.

If you give away something for free on your site, SOMEONE will sign up to get it.

But 99% of people won’t.

Why not?

Because your report has nothing to do with what that person wants at that moment.

It’s like if you walked into H&M for a new belt and the salesperson said: “Would you like to see our new dress shirts that just came in?”. No, you wouldn’t.

The bottom line?

When you offer your visitors something that’s a perfect fit for what they came to your site for, they’re MUCH more likely to opt-in.

For example, I noticed people leaving comments on my Google Ranking Factors post like this…

…and this:

These people were basically telling me in black and white:

“Brian, this is a great post. But it’s an overwhelming amount of information. How can I actually put this stuff into practice?”

That’s when I realized that a checklist that listed the 10 most important factors — along with practical tips for implementing them — would add a lot of value to that post.

Another example:

James at SuperFastBusiness.com gives away text transcripts of his podcasts:

What do you think happens when you click on that purple box?

You’re taken to a squeeze page where you can download the PDF:

Other things you can give away as a Content Upgrade:

• A set of bonus tips
• Downloadable PDF version of the article
• A video tutorial that dives deeper into one section from your post
• A visual guide to your post (for example, a mind map or infographic)
• An interview with an expert on your post’s topic
• A free product guide or hands-on review (this is PERFECT for ecommerce sites)

The possibilities are endless.

Now that you’ve decided on what you’re going to give away, it’s time to get this party started.

Step #3: Create Your Content Upgrade Resource

Here’s the deal:

When someone first signs up for your email list they’re actively looking for reasons to opt out…

…and if you give them one, they’ll take it.

On the other hand, if you wow new subscribers with a GREAT first email, they’re much more likely to stick with you for life.

(You know what they say about first impressions…)

That’s why I decided to set aside 5-hours to outline and write my Google Ranking Factors checklist.

But I took things one step further.

After I finished writing the checklist, I sent it to a professional graphic designer on Elance.

She turned my checklist from this…

to this:

Needless to say, this professional design makes a HUGE difference in how people perceive the value of my checklist.

When someone receives a high-quality resource in their inbox (like this checklist), they think to themselves:

“Hey, this was pretty cool. I’ll make sure to keep an eye out for their next email.”

And because your list loves what you’re sending them, you’re going to increase your conversion rate over the long-term.

In fact,  you’ll actually get messages from people that say they’re looking forward to future emails from you.

For example, this is an email I recently received from a subscriber that just finished reading my Google Ranking Factors Checklist:

Having a high-value resource in hand is great…

…but it’s not nearly as important as the next step in the Content Upgrade process.

 Step #4: Give Your Resource Away 

Like anything in conversion rate optimization, HOW you present your Content Upgrade is key. In fact, your pitch is 10x more important than the resource itself.

Here’s what I mean…

As I’m sure you’ve seen yourself, lame pitches like “sign up for our newsletter” and “download our whitepaper” aren’t effective anymore.

To put it another way, you really need to sell your Content Upgrade.

Here’s the approach that worked best for me.

First, I added a yellow box at the end my blog post introduction:

My old blog post conclusion asked people to leave a comment. I swapped that conclusion out with a pitch to download the checklist:

When someone clicks on the link in the yellow box or the download image at the end of the post, a LeadPages box appears that asks them to opt-in:

According to my Analytics, 65% of people that see that box enter their email and opt-in:

Because it converts so well, I recommend using LeadPages to giveaway your Content Upgrade resource.

If you’d prefer not use LeadPages, you can create a normal opt-in form in Aweber or MailChimp.

For example, you can embed a normal opt-in box like this into your blog posts:

(You’d just want to replace the generic “Free Updates” with a description of your Content Upgrade resource)

Pro Tip: The Power of The Yellow Box

Here’s one of the most surprising things I learned from this campaign:

The simple yellow box I added to my blog post grabbed A LOT of attention.

Just look at how many people clicked on the little yellow box vs. the massive download image.

Yellow Box:

Huge download image:

As you can see, people’s eyes (and cursors) naturally gravitate to the yellow box.

I highly recommend using a yellow box on your site so that you maximize the number of clicks and opt-ins that you generate from your Content Upgrade.

Here’s the code you can add to your theme’s “functions.php” file (or “custom_functions.php” on Thesis) to create a yellow box:

function make_yellowbox($atts, $content = null) {
   return '<p style="background: none repeat scroll 0 0 #ff9; clear: both; margin-bottom: 18px; overflow: hidden; border: 1px solid #e5e597; padding: 13px;">' . do_shortcode($content) . '</p>';
}
add_shortcode('yellowbox', 'make_yellowbox');

Once the code it added, any text wrapped inside of this shortcode will appear in a yellow box.

[yellowbox]Here is the text in the yellow box[/yellowbox]

Step #5: Get More Email Subscribers

Now that you have the Content Upgrade set up, you should notice a massive increase in subscribers coming from that page.

But don’t stop there.

I’ve since added The Content Upgrade to three additional posts at Backlinko. Like with my Google Ranking Factors post, conversions on those other page have shot through the roof.

In fact, The Content Upgrade has brought in an EXTRA 655 subscribers in only 18 days:

Because it works so well, The Content Upgrade is going to be the focus of my list building from now on.

So I recommend repeating The Content Upgrade process on other high-traffic pages on your site.

The more you scale this process, the more you’ll increase conversions on your website.

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